Board of Zoning Appeals (BZA) Meeting   3/3/2026

Could you all check those mics just so Marsha has that correct?

Good afternoon.

It's 2 p.m. and as Deputy Zone Administrator of Albemarle County, I call this meeting of March 3rd, 2026 to order.

First order of business is to establish a quorum.

I'm going to start with Ms. Joseph.

If you all could state your name and say aye or present and just go down the line here and that as far as each individual.

Kurt Burkhart, President John Shepherd, President Ronald Rosenberg, President Bo Carrington, President There are some additional staff here in the audience.

The Zoning Administrator, Bart Svoboda, James Bowling, the BZA Staff Attorney Liaison, Andy Herrick, Jennifer Tevendale, and Marsha Alley.

The next order of business is the election of officers.

So yeah, introduce the item.

Sorry, I apologize.

We're going to first take the first nomination for the chair position.

There's a nomination of the slate for the three positions and second by Mr. Shepherd.

Ms. Joseph.

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg.

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd.

Aye.

Mr. Carrington.

Aye.

Mr. Burkhart.

Mr. Burkhart, you are now in charge.

Pardon me?

Yeah.

No, no, that's fine, John.

No, that works.

Wow, what an awesome responsibility.

I appreciate the board's confidence.

I would ask your indulgence with me because I have not done this with the BZA, but I understand with everyone that's sitting on the dais today as

the outgoing chair Mr. Carrington said to me being a board chairman actually makes it makes you a much better board member so I look for your guidance if I happen to go down a rabbit hole or get to a dead end please help direct me out so we can keep things going and bear with me as I go through this

run of show because it's one thing to sit there and watch somebody else navigate.

And so now that I'm in that position, and again, I appreciate your patience as I go through this, I'll get a cadence of it sooner or later, but at least for today, we've got a light agenda.

And for that, believe me, I'm very appreciative.

Okay.

Okay, the next order of business on the meeting agenda for today, since we have no public hearings, which is item number four.

Yeah, excuse me, let's back up again on number three under the organizational meeting, which is our first meeting of this new year.

I can't believe that because under our rules and procedures, that's what it says.

The first meeting will be our annual meeting.

I'll ask the members if you've had a chance to go through these.

I'd like to remind you what the procedures are for amending the Rules of Procedure.

Any of these Rules of Procedures may be amended by a majority vote of the BZA at the next regular scheduled meeting following a regular meeting at which notice of the motion to amend is given.

Re-adoption is not required, however, if the BZA chooses to re-adopt the rules and procedures without amendments and all comments, discussion is completed, I will call for a motion and a second.

So I would like to ask, have the members had a chance to review and possibly want to make comment today on the rules and procedures that were adopted last year?

Thank you.

Quick question.

Have there been any changes since last year proposed?

Not to my knowledge.

I'll just add while I have the mic that it's my opinion that we did make some changes in this version, and we haven't had enough.

meetings.

We haven't had very many reps with these rules and procedures in place.

So I don't feel like they've been tested enough for me to have any strong opinions about additions or deletions.

I just want to, I'm not raising an issue for any changes, just clarification from Ms. Alley on deferrals 5D, page 5 in the packet.

Are we mentioning this section which covers the tie votes in an appeal in the opening remarks at the start of a public hearing?

I think that we've had a fair amount of discussion with that following a case that we had, my gosh,

maybe two years ago on a tie vote.

towards the bottom of page seven.

I can probably address that.

So I don't believe there's formal procedure that's been adopted that we announce that could be part of, if the BZA chooses to make that either by policy or by amending these, we could do that either way.

The state code actually places the burden on the appellant to do that.

So,

I guess it's up to the BZA on how they would want to handle that.

Comment?

I was just going to maybe add and ask that

As that's a fairly uncommon occurrence in my experience, I think my recollection is that we also have the chance to communicate that in the letter that is sent to the appellant afterwards.

Fair enough.

I was reviewing those while you guys were chatting and it's not mentioned there.

I'm agreeing with Mr. Carrington.

It probably should be in the approval or denial letter.

And even though it's a burden placed on the appellant, I think Albemarle County has always been one to make sure that everybody knew everything that they needed to do as part of the procedure.

Mr. Chairman, can I ask a question?

Yes, you may.

Actually, this is for the county attorney or his assistant about, to your knowledge,

Were there any changes to the Virginia Code made last spring?

That's the first question.

Okay, good.

I just wanted to be sure that we didn't go through this process and have the Virginia Code changed and all of a sudden we have to do it again in three months.

No.

Great.

We should?

Yeah.

I second.

Ms. Joseph?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Aye.

The motion to readopt the proposed rules and procedures is passed by a five to zero vote.

Okay, we will then move on to the meeting schedule, which is the third item, number C. And in your packet, we had some dates that were proposed.

I'd like to open it for discussion.

What's been presented?

Are there any dates that don't work?

I think we've worked around the election issue.

And from time to time, people will obviously have issues that come up that do take them away.

When is Labor Day?

September 7th okay this is a week before okay September 7th yes number seven date will remain in infamy okay so September 1st is okay

And November 10th is the work around the election date?

Is that?

Yes.

That's why it's in bolded type.

I just wanted to ask about the April date.

We had talked about whether there may be an appeal that was scheduled for that date.

And I do have a travel conflict.

I recall that Mr. Rosenberg might as well.

Yeah, right now we're just working on the calendar.

We'll address the pending appeals.

Afterwards.

All right.

Until the 20th?

Correct.

OK.

Mr.

Guarantee, you were working with the zoning administrator on a possible another date and I heard some interaction back and forth.

My recollection is that it was difficult to find a date that worked well between the auditorium availability and our schedules.

So what I will ask as far as the

I assume that based on consensus here, we're good to go with this.

If we are, then I'll entertain a motion to adopt the calendar for future meetings through the rest of this year until February 1st of, is that what we're doing here?

February 1st of 2027?

Or are we doing it on the end of this year, the December 1st meeting?

December 1st, okay, okay.

To adopt this meeting calendar.

Excuse me, can I interject really quickly?

Just to clarify, the date that you're concerned about is in April?

Is that correct?

All right, hang on.

Yeah, Bart Svoboda, the zoning administrator, with the schedule that we have before you, we have some dates built in there beyond December 1st, right?

So if you approve just what you have in front of you, if you approve that December motion, then we will be meeting in December because it's not pushed far enough to do the January meeting

So organization meeting or the year following.

So we'll have to meet twice.

We'll have to meet in December and January.

So the recommendation is that you adopt the schedule as proposed that gives us that leeway to be able to have this first organizational meeting, possibly say February with an application versus January just to have the organizational meeting.

That's been,

kind of customary if the BZA wishes to change that, that's fine.

So excuse me.

So should we propose this?

So we're talking 16 months, what is laid out here.

And actually, we're in February.

Wait a minute, this is March 03, February 03.

I have no opposition to extending that.

If it

provides a target for the organizational meeting in January mostly.

Now, let me ask this question.

Should there be an appeal, which hypothetically there could be, we would also do an appeal if there was in January?

Correct, yes.

That is, it's the first meeting of the year.

We target it in January, and we will take a straw poll to see around the holidays who's available.

And if we have a scheduled appeal or other application, then we will hold that meeting, right, regardless.

If we don't, because we have our timeframes, we have to meet under state code on any of those applications.

If we don't, then we try and coordinate it with everyone's schedule, but not let it go too far as to, which is why we're doing this, we felt like March is far enough to put off the organizational meeting versus that first, like I use this year as an example, I think it was like January 2nd, right?

Can I ask a question?

I don't know if this is for you or for the county attorney.

If we don't adopt the new procedural rules, would any action in an appeal be lawful?

I don't know, I do know that it creates unnecessary complications and the reason that staff has prepared an organizational calendar that goes over, or a proposed calendar that goes into next year is to set the stage for the organizational meeting next year.

Is there a reason why the body has to adopt every year procedural rules?

One of the reasons for that is that the board's rules and procedures include virtual meeting, excuse me, remote participation and state law requires that the body have a remote participation policy that's adopted annually.

So if it weren't done as part of the rules procedures at the outset of the year, it would need to be done at some point during the year.

for this remote- For nothing else and for the remote participation component of the rules of procedure.

So without that, we could establish a set of rules and just let them roll.

The rules of procedure, yes.

And the Board of Supervisors does that.

The Planning Commission does that.

Most of the county public bodies do.

And especially now that there's the remote participation component,

Just on the calendar extending into 2027, it's my personal opinion that having the additional flexibility to push

The organizational meeting farther out should appeal or variance request not materialize, that that's beneficial in conserving resources.

So I would like to go ahead and approve it as submitted through April 27.

Any further discussion on that?

Ms. Joseph?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

Mr. Burkhart?

Okay, the motion to adopt the proposed meeting schedule for 2026 with those additional dates through 2027 has been carried by a 5-0 vote.

Okay, we'll move on to the next

Item, no public hearing today.

I found on page 14 just something that may be misleading.

It's the one, two, three, four, five, six paragraph down, starts with Mr. Sipe presented a letter sent by his client to the county.

He never presented that to this board.

He talked about it and maybe waved it around, but we were not presented with that letter.

So if we can find some other language that says he talked about the letter, he referred to the letter.

Correct.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Great.

Thank you.

Okay, with those, unless I see anyone else flagging, I think we're good to move with the minutes.

We accept the minutes as with the amendment suggested by Ms. Joseph for the

Yes.

Do I hear a second?

Second.

And just to clarify, that's swapping out the word referenced or referred to.

Got it.

Referenced.

Yes.

Ms. Joseph?

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg?

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd?

Aye.

So is it absent?

Aye.

The motion to approve the minutes of December 2nd, 2025 was carried by a four to zero vote with one abstention.

We're moving on to old business.

And I see we have a couple of items under here.

So under old business, we have a budget update.

We did propose and submit the increase to 6,000 as the BZA requested.

The budget process has just begun.

So we won't know the result of that request until, I believe it's April 22nd or 23rd, but that's when the budget process concludes.

No additional discussion, no updates from last time.

Thank you.

A slight little update here is that Fred Missell is a new board member.

He is the vice chair and I spoke with Mr. Missell and I sent him all the information that had been sent to the prior

Board Chair.

I have not heard back from Mr. Missell yet.

However, as Bart just said, they're going through the budget process.

And I can imagine this year is going to be extremely complicated because I'm sure they've lost a lot of federal funding.

So they probably are working hard on this budget.

So I hope that we can give Mr. Missell some grace.

I personally have had the experience of really seeing the value of alternates for this board.

I haven't been out of, I would have missed, you know, three or four meetings in a row had they actually been scheduled.

And I think I'm a sort of a typical case.

And since there wasn't here, you know,

Someone misses a meeting, you're not being paid.

I don't really see what the big expense is.

I wish it could be pushed.

I think it's just a valuable idea.

And I think I would like to see sort of a full court press on making that happen or at least requesting that it happen.

Any other comments on this subject?

Okay, seeing none, we'll move on to the application process.

I think that's the other part of the old business before us.

I believe we had some questions during the last application about staff's assistance on how things are filled out within the office, things like that.

So we did some research on that particular application and got with our staff and the

The applicant came in and asked for assistance.

We have two kiosks in the lobby.

And the way that staff operates is the applicant will sit in the chair, open their account, and they submit their information with some guidance on how to follow through with our electronic submittal.

So all our submittals are currently electronic and we provide that service.

on a daily basis.

We do about 200 walk-ins a week.

That's our average, 45,000 phone calls a year.

So we're pretty attuned to helping folks and getting them used to what's happening in those submittals.

So that is the research we've done on that application and various other ones.

So we checked on clearances and site plans and different things.

We have

we'll call them regular customers, routine developers or builders that come in and they kind of know the process and they actually submit from offsite.

I can also add that we have taken the information that was on the paper application and clearly identified it where on the now electronic version in multiple areas that information

the different things that they have to submit.

Like it was in the old version form?

Yes.

I guess what I'm wondering about also is if, and I think it's a good service to sit down with people who are coming in who've never used this before and helping them go through the application process.

Yeah, that's standard in the submittal.

So when we talk about an application, it's an online form, right?

So you're gonna fill out, it's gonna ask for your name, fill out your name, your email address, you gotta upload certain documents, you can't proceed without that.

So upload justification statement here, required document, those sorts of things to be able to move through the process.

And those prompts are reflected off of, say, the old paper application that said name.

Mr. Svoboda, when you're sitting there next to them, you're giving them words that they can use to say, this is my justification.

and I just want there's something in there that they acknowledge the fact that they agree with everything that's written in there.

I guess that's what I'm thinking and honestly it's because I've just come off something in what I do for a living that makes me realize that when someone is helping someone to put the information within the system that you've got to make sure that this person understands what's going in as you're helping them.

And I think our front office staff do a good job with that with the number of folks that they help.

They're not putting any words in anybody's mouth.

Yeah, I wasn't implying that.

It's just that I know that I would have a propensity to help somebody more than they probably I should.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah, we do also a QC on those applications to say if things are missing, like we will let them know that if a box is missed or a document is not there, we ask them to provide the additional information or in this case, a justification statement.

Whether that's a plan, some people might accidentally upload their grocery list.

as opposed to their sketch plan for their variance.

So we'll tell them, well, this isn't sufficient for us to comment on or to review.

We need a more accurate representation of what the property is like.

So that happens also throughout the process.

Some folks just don't.

If we found this to be sort of an ongoing problem, I can just tell you from the election world, it's a totally routine thing for a person who has trouble voting for whatever reason.

They just have to sign a little affidavit saying,

This guy helped me, and the person who helped him has also signed this saying, I only am representing what he told me.

And it's extremely routine.

We've got a pad at the election where you just pull them off to fill it out.

But it clarifies the whole thing.

One time knockoff, I don't see any point in worrying about that, but if it's an ongoing

Yes, staff keeps an eye on the process and we will monitor this amongst other things and any improvements that we can make

Well, as the course of the public hearing, it's always your option to ask the appellant that comes in whether you were provided any assistance by county staff on the completion of the application.

You can always ask that.

Any further discussion?

So there is an appeal that has been filed.

We are in the process right now of working out

it was an appeal of a violation.

So they're working those particulars out as far as to abate that violation.

And thus they have requested the current timeframe for the April meeting.

But if that, which we anticipate that it can get done before that meeting or any of the packets and things like that go out that we would have that resolved

or they would request more than likely.

This has to do some intricacies of ownership of property and different things that we're just back and forth on.

It's nothing deliberate in the sense of the property owner.

Well, you must be doing a pretty good job because the number of meetings that we've had and the issues that we've had to deal with have been lessened since when I first joined here almost five years ago.

In this particular case, it's been a very large team effort.

Okay, so you'll keep us surprised on whether or not we move forward with an April meeting, correct?

Yes.

Okay.

Is there any other new business that members of the BCA would like to bring up at this time?

No?

Okay, hearing none, then we will move toward adjournment.

I'd like to entertain a motion to adjourn this meeting at 2 37 on

March 3rd, 2026.

Second.

Call the roll, please.

Ms. Joseph.

Aye.

Mr. Rosenberg.

Aye.

Mr. Shepherd.

Aye.

Aye.

I have a vote of five to zero.